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HarshKumar Jha
HarshKumar Jha

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From Weeks to 15 Minutes: How We Built a Data Migration System That Changed Everything

#data #datamigration #technology #startup

Part 1: The Business Story – Why We Built This

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Imagine this: It's Monday morning at a utility company. They've just signed up for SMART360—an amazing platform that will transform how they manage customers, meters, and billing. They're excited. Their leadership is excited.

Then reality hits.

They have 500,000+ customer records sitting in an old system. They need to move it all over. The spreadsheets are messy. Column names don't match. Phone numbers are formatted differently. Some data is missing. Some is duplicated.

Their options?

  1. Manual mapping: Hire a team to manually match columns, clean data, and load it in batches. Timeline? 4-6 weeks. Cost? Thousands in labor.
  2. Custom scripts: Build one-off ETL pipelines. It works, but breaks with the next dataset. Timeline? 2-3 weeks per data type.
  3. Hope and pray: Let someone use Postman to upload rows one by one. Timeline? As long as it takes. Accuracy? Not great.

Sound familiar?

The Real Cost of the Problem

Let's be honest—this isn't just a technical inconvenience.

For Operations Teams:

  • They can't start operations until data is migrated
  • Delayed go-live means delayed revenue
  • Every week of delay costs real money

For Support Teams:

  • One support engineer is stuck helping customers migrate data
  • That's one less person handling actual support tickets
  • Customers are frustrated waiting for assistance

For Finance Teams:

  • Billing can't start until consumer data is accurate
  • Meter readings don't have a home
  • Payment history is scattered or missing

For Customers:

  • They want to go live now, not "eventually"
  • Manual migrations feel unprofessional
  • Data errors = billing errors = unhappy customers

We saw this happening. Over and over. Customers would onboard, hit the data migration wall, and suddenly it's week 3 and nothing's moved. Our support team was drowning. Our reputation was taking a hit.

That's when we decided to solve it properly.

What We Built

We didn't build just another CSV uploader. We built something that understands the problem at its core.

Here's what it does:

  1. Intelligently maps your messy data to our system fields automatically (not 100%, but ~95% accuracy)
  2. Transforms data on the fly (fixes formatting, splits names, cleans addresses, standardizes everything)
  3. Validates everything before it touches production (3 layers of validation)
  4. Processes massive files fast (500K+ records in 15 minutes, not weeks)
  5. Gives you control (you can override any mapping, any transformation)
  6. Saves templates (reuse mappings for next time)

The Impact

Here's what changed:

Before:

  • Customers waiting 4-6 weeks to go live
  • Support team spending 30% of time on migrations
  • High error rates = data cleanup nightmare
  • One customer type at a time

After:

  • Customers go live in 1-2 weeks (migration is ~15 mins to 1 hour)
  • Support team reclaimed (no more manual migrations)
  • Error rates dropped by 85% (validation catches issues before they happen)
  • We can handle Consumers, Meters, Payments, Assets, and more—all in the same flow

Numbers That Matter

  • 500,000+ records migrated in a single session
  • 50MB+ file sizes handled without breaking a sweat
  • Support for 1 million+ records in infrastructure
  • 95%+ automatic field mapping accuracy
  • 15 minutes average processing time (was 4-6 weeks)

Translation?

  • Customers go live 20x faster
  • Support team saves ~100+ hours per month
  • Zero more "data migration support tickets"
  • Happy customers = more referrals

Why This Matters to You

Whether you're a product manager thinking about customer success, an engineer building data pipelines, or a CTO looking at operational efficiency:

This is what happens when you take a real problem and actually solve it. Not with a Band-Aid. With a proper system.

It's not about the technology stack. It's about understanding that migrations are how customers experience your platform first. If that experience is painful, nothing else matters.

I Harsh Jha, Software Engineer at Bynry Inc., spearheaded the implementation of Data Migration. I work alongside Tech Lead Gaurav Dagde to continuously improve the quality and reliability of the Smart360 platform.

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